Sentient, aquatic life, long before man?

Ok here are some little facts of how the generally accepted story goes. Bear in mind that this IS ONLY the generally accepted story, nothing more, nothing less.

- On Earth, it is generally accepted that life began around 3.8 and 3.3 billion years ago, in a primordial soup of simple organic molecules. Whether this is the case, we will most likely never truly know.

- The first complex aquatic life (i.e: fish) appeared between 500 to 530 million years ago and then underwent a long period of evolution so that, today; aquatic life is by far the most diverse group of vertebrates.[/font]





- It took another whopping, circa 450 million years for the first of our ancestors to emerge on Earth.

- About 160,000 years ago, the first known, (or so we assume) sentient, self aware form of life appeared, the homo sapien that would one day learn and develop into the people that you see all around you.



- In that time, from 500 million (first fish) to 50 million years ago (first human ancestors), sea life had to have evolved, and evolved......and evolved.

- Today, even with all the billions of people, cats, dogs, horses etc, still around 80 to 85 percent of life on earth resides in the oceans.

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So in the end i guess the question is simple.

If it only took a relatively small amount of time for humans to become truly sentient, and sea life had a lot longer for that opportunity, why then is there no sea creature at the level or above that of humans???

Or....is there? would they want to make themselves known? After all we are a very violent, disorganised, greedy , etc species at our worst.......would they intentionally keep their existence a secret?

i too believe dolphins are at least much smarter than we make them out to be. whether or not they have some sort of (seemingly) primative organized civilization is a little out there, but fun to think about.

id like to her mor eof your thoughts concerning what you think is possible.

the thing i like about the dolphins and whales etc is that at 1 time they came out of the water...and then they went back..i think its because they knew what was gonna happen and thought...i am not hanging around here and promply went back..good ideas m8

If it only took a relatively small amount of time for humans to become truly sentient, and sea life had a lot longer for that opportunity, why then is there no sea creature at the level or above that of humans???

Or....is there? would they want to make themselves known? After all we are a very violent, disorganised, greedy , etc species at our worst.......would they intentionally keep their existence a secret?

Sea creature, like ceatacians, could well be as intelligent as people, but two things hold them back from having a civilisation like ours:

1) A lack of a body part than can grasp and manipulate tools with great dexterity.
2)No fire. Without which, no civilisation could exist.

Sea creatures would need access to land in order to develop a civilisation. Otherwise, at most, they could have a highly complex social structure but be limited in what their species could achieve technologically.

They may well be as clever as us and just enjoy living the care free life in the sea, but that is where they will stay.

shadow, you make some interesting points, but there's one I'd like to comment on:

If it only took a relatively small amount of time for humans to become truly sentient, and sea life had a lot longer for that opportunity, why then is there no sea creature at the level or above that of humans???

My response is that time doesn't necessarily drive evolution to a particular goal. Look, for example at the several branches of primates. Assuming that we started from a common hominid ancestor, then Homo sapiens (humans), Gorilla gorilla (mountain gorilla), and Pan pansicus (chimpanzee) all had just the same amount of time to develop fire, tools, space flight, and conspiracy theories.

Yet none of the others did. Why not?

The answer, I believe, is that the path we took was to forsake arborealism for ground living -- probably driven by the drying-out of what's now Ethiopia. To see above the grass, we had to stand upright --which freed our hands for other things. Of course, there were a bunch of other things which drove hominid evolution -- the European Pleistocene weather, which drove Homo neanderthalensis to having huge noses and sinus cavities, an omnivorous diet which drove all the Homo genus' dentition development, etc., etc. Some combination of environmental factors drove one particular genus to develop higher cognition, and they were rewarded by being allowed to not go extinct (at least, not yet).

Put another way: why aren't cock-roaches intelligent? Ghod knows they've been around since the Ordovician or Mississippian! Answer: they don't need to be. Cock-roaches, like cetaceans, marmots, and people, adapt for one reason: so that they can live long enough to make more cock-roaches, cetaceans, marmots, and people. If smart is a survival prone mechanism, the critter will get smart or get extinct. If you need to get this smart in order to survive, you will -- but no smarter. And why is that? Because being any more smart (or big, or small, or dextrous) than you need to be is not a survival-prone mechanism.

Cetaceans, cephalopods, molluscs, bony fish, sharks -- they've been around (except for the cetaceans) for hundreds of millions of years. And just how smart are they?

As smart as they need to be -- no more.

We place such an importance on the fact we are "smart," yet we act more like a virulent disease (relative to the Earth as a whole) than anything else. When we all suffocate under ever increasing mounds of our own poop, I wonder what nature will replace us with?

Originally posted by Astronomer68
When we all suffocate under ever increasing mounds of our own poop, I wonder what nature will replace us with?

why, the cockroach of course!

DUUUUUUHH!



[edit on 6-9-2005 by purelogik]

""""My response is that time doesn't necessarily drive evolution to a particular goal. Look, for example at the several branches of primates. Assuming that we started from a common hominid ancestor, then Homo sapiens (humans), Gorilla gorilla (mountain gorilla), and Pan pansicus (chimpanzee) all had just the same amount of time to develop fire, tools, space flight, and conspiracy theories.

Yet none of the others did. Why not? """"

Chimpanzee's do have tools, and in fact, different chimps from different regions, or "tribes" have different tools then the others. So clearly they took the tools as far as they needed in specific regions to get food, which is all the tools are, one is for ants, one is for clams or something witha hard shell, i forget honestly. We know they can learn sign language and gorilla's as well, and clearly they can think and feel, so there is a significant amount of development there.

This is a little out there, although I do like that you point out that dolphins are intelligent. they are probably the most intelligent and advanced species in the ocean, but I am afraid it is still lightyears away from humans.

You watched that episode of the Simpsons where the dolphins take over Springfield, didn't you?

I do believe that there iss highly intellegent marine life. The best evidence I can propose is this. www.npca.org... The life span of this octopus us 3.5 to 4 years, but beached whale carcases have been found with sucker marks 2 meters across. Maybe some species live longer and retain more knowledge, becoming more intellegent, and harder to catch.

There are also instances where octopus have left their tank at night, entered tanks placed accross the room, eaten the ocupants of that tank, and returned home to their tank. they have also been observed changing color into checkerboard paterns to camoflauge into a background, even producing indevidual squares with proper dimensions. That would make them impossible to find on the ocean floor if they didn't want to be found.

As smart as they need to be -- no more.

This is offtopic but this IMO is the reason why we should embrase cognitive enhancement technology as that is the only feasible rout towards rapid evolution of intellect. Maybe once we get a few hundred super-scientists we can finally figure out things like Warp Drives, Wormholes and Curing the Common Cold. You know holy grail type stuff.

Originally posted by shbaz
You watched that episode of the Simpsons where the dolphins take over Springfield, didn't you?

"Man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much... the wheel, New York, wars, and so on, whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely the dolphins believed themselves to be more intelligent than man for precisely the same reasons."

Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

H2G2 has the answer for everthing!

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